According to research by Dr. Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert Hare, one in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath. Their research will be presented in a BBC Horizon documentary called Are you good or evil?, Wednesday, September 7, at 9 p.m.
Read One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds, on Guardian.co.uk.
Story suggested by a Lovefraud reader.
SK:
Yeah, the job I left was also from a big company that a lot of you would know.
I LOVE your third paragraph…soooo true. OMG…no one could have said it better!!! And I never thought of or looked at it that way before, but you are so right!!! They can just fake their way through…and boy, have I seen it! Sometimes they do get caught down the road though…I have seen that, too!
I was just reading up on Ted Bundy in the wikipedia.
One interesting thing:
No matter how I try to find a way to argue that he might have been influenced by these factors, in the end all indicators point to choosing evil for the sake of evil. There were plenty of other things that could have influenced him. So why did these particular things have such an attraction for him? What is it about hurting people that has an addictive quality for some people?
I agree with you on that, Sky, they still have CHOICES no matter how badly they have been used and abused as children, or how much porno they have seen or how many twinkies they have eaten.
Donna, I realize not EVERY prison guard is a psychopath to start with or becomes one after working there, but there are way too many who are just as bad, I think, as the inmates and tend to be high in P-traits. Being a prison guard has got to be a miserable job and I do not envy anyone who does it. The good ones that are there though have my admiration, because they put their lives on the line just like cops do. It has been my misfortune to meet and interact with many guards that I would consider “not nice” people who seem to go out of their way to be rude and verbally abusive to visitors to the prisons.
Oxy,
my curiosity is about those choices.
For example, if a psychopath was told, since childhood, that being generous and atruisitic was BAD or against the rules of society, what would a sociopath do?
I think ODD is an integral link to this pathology. They do things with the express purpose of being oppositional to authority.
Even the word “sociopath” means “against society”. I wonder if we could trick them into WANTING to be good. They are very simple minded after all. Even the high IQ ones, can be messed with because they don’t really know what they want.
Sky, I think tricking them into being “good” by telling them good is actually bad would be like trying to tell a child everything in the world not to do….like do not climb on the ceiling fan, do not climb on the roof, do not….etc etc. there are just not enough hours in the day to mention everything that they should not do or should do, and most of “telling” a kid how to behave is not SAID, it is modeled. You’d have to start when the kid was 1 day old and model abuse, then expect him to do the opposite? Nah, I don’t think it would work.
Some psychopaths are oppositional, especially as teenagers, and if you tell them not to do something they will do it or die, but I think it is about control, and if you are telling them something you are attempting to control them and they will NOT allow someone else to Control them. I know my P son would do the exact opposite of what I told him to do as a teenager, even if it brought consequences on him…he still sees himself as a winner not a loser even though he’s spent more than 50% of his life in prison. Just like You mentioned in the quotes about Ted Bundy, my son will NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY for his crimes, they are all my fault because I was such a mean parent and tried to control him….like keep him from stealing. Mean old me.
Oxy,
it’s so very interesting how much alike these spaths are.
Shifting blame is a huge huge red flag. They all do this.
Hating their mom is another red flag, yet my dad, who is a narcissist, WORSHIPS HIS MOM (trauma bond). But my mom, whom I think is a spath, worships her dad but doesn’t say much about her mom.
I don’t think tricking them about what we value is that difficult. They don’t actually listen to your words, as much as they watch your face for emotions. You can trick them by expressing angst when you are happy and vice versa. Believe me: this actually works, I’ve done it.
It’s so very strange, that it’s hard to believe.
It might be about control, that’s a big issue for spaths. But I’ve also read that it is about shame. They refuse to be shamed because they feel they were unfairly shamed early in life, so they behave shamelessly as a protective mechanism.
I guess we need to find a spath and shame him into telling the truth! LOL!
spaths NEVER tell the truth, when a lie will do just as well. 😛
Donna wrote,
“I don’t quite agree with you about the prison guards. My uncle and two cousins both worked in a prison, and they aren’t psychopaths. So evil traits don’t have to rub off. I guess it has to do with the obvious divide between the staff and inmates.”
I agree. My brother has worked in corrections for nearly 20 years. He has great empathy for people in general, but not for the inmates. I used to be quite dismayed at his attitude towards these men, but I think I understand it much better now. He sees sociopaths every day and I think he knows any effort to feel sorry for them and to rehabilitate is wasted.
Dawn, that is the way it SHOULD be with a corrections officer, exactly, but unfortunately I think too many times people who are psychopaths already go into corrections (or other jobs where there is “authority” or “power”—cops, judges, etc.) where they have power over others,, even if it is just over other psychopaths. They get off on ordering others around.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There was a psychological experiment done with college students, labeling some of them “guards” and some “prisoners” (I can’t remember where this was done but it was professionally done and published, but I have CRS) I’ll see if I can find the link, but anyway, the kids who were “labeled” the “guards” started to become abusive to the “prisoners” and this type of experiment has been conducted several times with the same results.
Look at Nazi Germany, not all the guards at those prisons were psychopaths, but the culture from the psychopathic thinking of the time, that the Jews were vermin, made these people lose their empathy for the prisoners as even human beings, it allowed them to do heinous crimes against humanity.
Being around abuse, cruelty and violence is bound to have some effects on the psyche and I think, with anyone, it takes I think a strong moral compass on the part of a guard, police officer, or attorney to cope with the kind of people they must work with on a day to day basis and keep their moral compass and their empathy intact.
Ox,
For sure there are people working in corrections who should not be there and abuse their power. There are those who enjoy having total power over other human beings and abuse it at will. And none of the others, the normal ones, say a word about it to those in authority who could stop it. But they know that if something happens, like an inmate riot, the abusers will be the first to die.